 Okay, you don't want to miss this next session, we're going to get started in just a second here. You know those SEOs that you kind of sense that they know things that you don't know and they have skills that you don't have and you kind of want to know what their secrets are? Russ Jones is exactly one of those people. So one of the things he knows about is making money. And that's the title of his talk. You want to be rich? How to make your consultancy profitable. He knows a lot about, used to work with a successful consultancy. Then he became a researcher, he's built tools, he's bought and sold businesses. He knows every aspect of the business. This is going to be an informative session. I'm sure we're going to enjoy it. I'm going to kick it over to our friend Russ Jones. Take it away Russ. You are not going to make it. The truth is if you think your talent and effort will make your business succeed, you won't make it. In fact, 25% of all new businesses will fail in the first two years. Made it past the first two year mark, great, good for you. 45% will fail within the first five years. Made it past five, even better. But 65%, almost two thirds will fail within the first 10. But why is this? What is the reason for businesses failing left and right? People just terrible at their jobs? Well, the truth is, is that we believe in an entrepreneurial economy, where we take people who are excellent at doing one thing and then ask them to run a business that does that thing. Today, I'm going to talk about something that I hate. I just truly hate it. It's hard to describe, but the reality is that business decisions matter so much about how effective your agency or consultancy will be. So today, I'm going to use the wisdom of the masses, the information I've been able to get from others across the web, people I've known for years running agencies and consultancies. And hopefully, we'll be able to get through some of this hard stuff about business and be able to help you build the kind of agency and consultancy that you want to have. But as I've said, I hate this stuff. I hate it. I've always hated it. I've always liked SEO. In fact, the last two jobs I have taken, I've made it clear on the negotiation table that I want absolutely nothing to do with making business decisions. But this graph right here shows exactly how I feel about it. There are things that I consider important, arguing on the internet and other things that I hate, but the reality is that business decisions have got to be the thing that I think is most important and I dislike. So we're going to start with costs and then deal with earnings and then get through the business stuff and then we'll be able to talk about SEO. But we've got to cover the hard stuff first. And the hardest part by far is people. People are expensive. In fact, 74% of individuals on a survey I provided reported that staffing is the majority of expenses and that's not unique to our industry. But we've also heard from these same individuals that moving away from the kind of stereotypical agency format of a bunch of full-time employees to a contractor-led type of company has been more effective. But how do we do that? How do we do that safely? And is it actually beneficial? Well, there's a lot that we can learn. So what do we do? Do we just fire everybody and replace them with contractors? Well, not exactly so fast. It turns out that when we just look at businesses that have made the decision to significantly decrease the number of employees, 83% of the time, they found that that was significantly financially valuable. Now, bear in mind, the majority of businesses have not significantly cut their staff, but those who have have found it valuable. But the reverse is true as well. We find that 69% of businesses that have made the same kind of decision except to increase staffing have seen financial benefit from it. But there is a big difference there, almost a 14-point difference. Well, that kind of feels bad because people are important. We care about people. People are the reason we have businesses. I think instead what we need to start doing is thinking about a traditional model versus a modern model. The traditional model is full-time with almost everybody showing up to the office and working all day. It requires lots of generalists. It requires people dedicate a very large amount of time to learning how the business works versus a modern model where we're kind of focusing more on contractors, more on project managers. This doesn't mean that we're employing fewer people. It just means that we're using them in a different way. Of course, you have to think about this from an ethical position as well. Our goal here is not to replace people and put them into jobs that are not worth taking. Instead, we want to treat our contractors with the same degree of respect and dignity and frankly pay them the difference now that they're specialists that we would have been paying where they full-time employes. But of course, the only cost isn't just people. It's rent. Now, we've actually seen something really interesting over the last several months, which is that most of us have been forced to go remote, if not all of us. But several businesses have gone remote or at least partly remote well before COVID-19. Now, a good percentage of companies report that rent is their second largest percentage of expenses. In fact, the company I worked at several years ago, it was rent that really dug our grave on several occasions because we made plans based on the growth of our company. And when we were shocked by certain changes, it meant that we were still stuck into bad rent contracts. So how have businesses done that have moved to an all remote or mostly remote strategy? Well, it turns out that most of the time companies have found this very beneficial. In fact, of the companies that have chosen to go fully remote, 85% of them have said it's been financially beneficial. They've reported that it's allowed them to be a lot more profitable and they've reported that they've actually seen increases in employee productivity. Now, I'm the first to say that going remote is not a panacea. In fact, you need to be very careful about company culture, about the mental health of your employees who are now working in an isolated environment. But it's certainly something worth considering. Now, here's the one that we almost never consider, mutiny. Think about it. Once the last time your company has ever even considered its leadership and whether or not they should remain. I think this is a legacy issue. It's the fact that our companies have almost all been guru led for decades, where we start with one person who knows SEO really well and might have some sort of really good personality. So they speak on stages and they get business. That doesn't make them good leaders or good business leaders in particular. Now, this is a tough one because we're talking about people we care about and people who are important to the business. In fact, what we find is that companies that have taken the choice to get rid of some of their leadership have only found by a small margin for that to be profitable. Of course, we also see in these anecdotes that a lot of the time these decisions have been made as a result of infighting or that the leadership changes weren't really about profitability and instead were about some other behavior that resulted in the need for a person to go. But it is important to think about your employees in the same way that you think about your leadership and that is that no one is above the company. Everybody is in this together. So I know it's difficult to talk about all of those cost issues but let's move on to the stuff that we care about a little bit more which is about making money. How do we increase our earnings? Well, one of my favorites is what I call the paradox of cutting services to earn more money. It seems kind of strange that you would get rid of business lines and then actually end up making more. But this is basic economics. You see, what we're looking at instead is the opportunity to focus on the things that really good at. New businesses often are stuck in this kind of situation where we think that we have to take on every type of job that's offered to us or we won't be able to keep our doors open. But that is a fool's errand. Ultimately, you'll be doing poorer jobs on work that you're not good at and you'll build a bad reputation that'll make it harder in the future for your business to succeed. So instead, what we want you to do is to focus on what you can master and then multiply the services that are based on that but get rid of the ones that ultimately you can't perform on. Now, this actually has led to one of my favorite sayings which has helped me land so many contracts which is when a customer comes to me and has four or five things that they want but one or two are things you don't offer. It just feels really good to say to them, you know what, we just don't do so and so. We only do the things we're really good at. I'd be happy to share you with some specialists individuals who are really good at this one or two things but as a business, I'm not gonna sell you a product that we're not proud of. And what you'll find is this will engender better loyalty and better relationship with your customers and you'll be able to do a better job and then just pass the work on, the specialty work to your contractors who are able to then do a better job than you. So what we have found is actually 85% of businesses that have cut service lines have said that it has been financially beneficial. 85%. This is one of if not the strongest and most profitable recommendations we found across the board. But of course, sometimes it makes sense to add service lines and 72% of businesses that had added service lines reported that it was profitable. So how do we do this in a way that is safe? Well, there are a couple of things that we can do. The first thing we can do is ask existing clients whether or not this is something that they're interested in. And instead of diving in completely headfirst, we can look at white labeling or finding some basic proofs of concept so that we're able to test out the waters, so to speak. But an important thing to do is to make sure that you plant a certain number of these new types of business lines rather than just one at a time. It's almost like a competitive relationship where we're looking at a number of service lines all at the same time to see which ones perform best. Now, hopefully what we'll be able to do is over time whittle down these new service lines so that we can get rid of the ones that aren't working. Don't be afraid to abandon ship quickly. You see the earlier that you failed, the faster that you can try again with something else. But hopefully one of those trees that you planted and nurtured will grow. And eventually you'll find that service line that it's complimentary and valuable and will allow you to grow your business. Often these are complimentary in the sense that they rely on very similar skill sets from what you've offered before. It's an easy way to identify new potential business lines. Look at what your staff is already capable of doing and then determine what you can use those people to accomplish in the time that they might have available. Now, this is probably my personal favorite. While cutting service lines has always been useful, this was the one that surprised me the most every time when I worked for a consultancy which was just raising prices. It seems silly at first. I remember the first and the second and the third and the fourth time always thinking there's no way that we can raise prices. People are gonna say no. People just aren't going to buy our products anymore but that's just not the case. Now of course there is a right and a wrong way to do it. Of businesses that have chosen to raise prices, 88% said that it helped them financially. That means that roughly one in 10 ended up finding out that their customers by and large weren't willing to follow suit but nearly 90% were. So don't be afraid to raise prices but make sure you do it in a way that is polite and that is thoughtful of your customers. I think there are maybe three or four steps that you should follow. The first is you should announce this early. Tell your customers, look, we're gonna be raising prices in the future, cost of doing businesses increased, we wanna invest in better products, et cetera but just let them know. Second, if that customer seems to be tied on budget or hesitate, be willing to grandfather them in for a while. This will engender trust and loyalty with them. They'll be happy about the fact that they get to get this better service but at their existing price and you're nowhere soft than you were before. Now the third thing is to be able to push this value proposition. Now that you've got a higher priced product, you've also got the opportunity to show people why that product is worth it. What value you can afford, what things you can do that you couldn't before. And then finally and most importantly, now that you've raised your prices, you're actually able to just deliver better products and services. It's that simple. You can't build a reputation if you're working with resources that are insufficient to actually accomplish the work that you promise. So if we're talking about chicken and egg, if we're talking about deciding between raising prices and offering better services, you've got to raise prices first. And it's going to work. In many cases, you'll be surprised to find that your customers are a lot happier with a better quality product at a higher price. So we've moved on from the costs and the earnings. We're done with the business part. Now for the fun part. Now for SEO. How do we do a better job as a consultancy or agency in making money that doesn't really involve just business decisions? Well, by far, the first one has got to be automation. In fact, 81% of businesses that have invested in automation have said that it was profitable. It was worth it. So what I think is that there are basically four different levels of automation. The first level of automation is just to take advantage of the tools you already have. So in this case, I'm assuming that a good number of you are Moz customers. And you can set up recurring or one-time PDF reports for automation within your campaigns. In fact, if you haven't done this yet and you're a Moz customer, just stop the presentation now, hop on a conference call with your other employees, ask forgiveness for the sins you've committed against them for not automating, and then put some of this automation in place. This presentation I'll be waiting for you later. Just get this done. It's so important and will make your business a lot more efficient. So these are just some basic reports that are available from scratch. Just inside of Moz's system, you simply select them. The basic levels and the ones that I've highlighted here like a competitive analysis are the types of things that you would expect out of seeing your family doctor for a checkup every year. The vast majority of websites benefit from just basic level of automated reporting because there are certain things you just have to know in order to make sure that your website is doing well. But good automation begets better automation. You see, once you find out from those regular reports like a quick site audit that there's something missing, that there's something wrong, well then you've got the opportunity to use other forms of automation like running a deeper full site audit report to identify exactly what's going wrong. Or for example, a deeper link audit because you've identified that there's a link problem. So use the tools that you already have. Chances are there's built-in automation that is a point and click away. Well, the second level is connecting the sources that you already own and use. So in this case, instead of using pre-built connections, we're creating the connections. Now the cool thing about this is that the community has just come alive in this area. We are in a renaissance of connecting data sources. They're just huge amounts of value to be derived from new and unique data mashups. And people are posting them to the internet for free. SheetsforMarketers.com is one of my favorite sites. They've got tons of Google Data Studio and Google Sheets mashups of data that allows you to produce and automate the process with just tons of different things that your consultancy already does. But don't just copy, contribute. The more data sets that you can connect, the more valuable you can be to the community as a whole. It's gonna help build your company's reputation. Might help you build some links as well. So don't be afraid to jump in. Now you might be saying, look, I'm not a programmer. I know the marketing side of SEM. I know HTML and JavaScript, but I don't know anything about Python or server-side markup languages. I just don't know exactly what to do. You don't have to be a pro to make this happen. Just go search Upwork for Google Data Studio and you'll find tons of people who are experts in this. Now, be careful. I mean, if you look at the examples here that I've shown you from the screenshot, there are a bunch of people who are offering like $3 an hour. You probably don't wanna work with them or if you do, you wanna offer them a fair wage, but chances are you'll be able to find individuals who can help you make those connections and make you automate things without actually having to be a programmer yourself. There's no reason, no reason not to move from the step one of automation to step two where you're building your own connections. Well, what's step three? Step three is where we start getting a little bit more thoughtful. This is where we move from originally built-in connections in automation to connecting sources that we already use to thinking about the steps, strategies and techniques that we currently employ and then applying some type of automation framework on top. So I call this third level strategic smart and adaptive. I'm gonna give just a simple example here that takes advantage of if this than that, which allows you to connect a lot of different services together. So let's just walk through an example. So a framework might look like this and first you just see a bunch of icons, doesn't make a lot of sense, but let's just go through it. I call this if this than that on steroids. Imagine first if this than that detects a drop in organic traffic because you connected it to Google Analytics. Well, then because of that, it checks a Google Sheet which tracks your rankings that you're pulling from the stat API. And if it finds out that both of those things are true that traffic has dropped and rankings have dropped, it checks link data from MozLink Explorer's API which perhaps you've put into Google Sheets as well. And then it determines if links are lost then it queues up a link analysis message. If not, then it queues up a page and site analysis message. And this queued message goes to one of your employees. You can send it via email, it's like Gmail which connects directly with if this than that. It can also then add that message to the analyst to do list. It can notify the analyst via Slack that this is something they need to do. It can add a calendar entry automatically for the analysis and the customer rep to talk about this problem and then send an email to the customer letting them know that you've already identified the problem and are working on it. And once you've set this up the first time it'll go every time. Now, what I like to do is to try and move to what I call the fourth level of automation. And the fourth level of automation is where we move out of simply mimicking human tasks to trying to do things that are better than what humans can already do. Now, this is where artificial intelligence starts to play. And the truth is is the vast majority of businesses don't have clients or customers who could really benefit from this. So I'm not gonna spend too much time on this slide. I just really want you to understand that this is coming. That there are businesses that are already looking at using artificial intelligence to identify and improve solutions. In fact, one of the ones that I've been working on for quite some time is using natural language programming to identify exactly what type of content Google prefers. Not based on human intuition but literally looking at the content from the kinds of natural language processing that Google is using in their current algorithms. Pretty straightforward, but this type of automation in the future will drive a lot of the innovation that's required to succeed. So if you're still on step one, you need to get started. You need to get started now. So these are the four levels of automation. Here's one just general rule of thumb. If you have to do it three times, automate it. So that's simple. All right, so let's talk about acquiring new businesses. Sometimes we just got to figure out how do we get new customers? Well, this is pretty straightforward. So I'm gonna run through what I think to be are the easiest and most straightforward ways of generating a natural feed of leads. First is to participate. Just get involved online using Quora Reddit, webmaster community, Twitter to answer questions and to provide information. Also using your own blog is one of the best ways just to get information out there and get your name out there. Now, here's a chance to steal a little tip from the local SEOs. We know about the importance of having identical NAT information like phone numbers across the web. Well, do the same when you're talking on the web about your business. Use the same username, use the same description. Make sure you're always using the same website. And that way individuals who encounter you across the web will always know that it's you and your business. You know, particular opportunity that I've found that's been very, very useful for small consultancies that are starting is the use of Clarity FM. Clarity is a basic tool where you sign up and you charge a certain amount of money per minute. And if you use your Clarity moniker in the post where you're answering questions, people can then know to easily visited Clarity and then sign up for a brief consultation. Now, the second thing is to practice. You need to get your name out there and you need to prove that you can do it. And what I recommend is doing work for nonprofits. Now, how do you find a nonprofit that needs help? Just look at job postings. Chances are there's a nonprofit in your area right now who is looking for an SEL. Contact them, say, look, we're not looking to take the job from anybody. We're not looking to become your consultancy. We just wanna do some work for you on your behalf while you're trying to hire. This is a great opportunity to build up case studies and to build up relationships with businesses and organizations in the community. Now, the third thing that I like most is programming. This is close to my heart. This is how I used to get business for my old consultancy. It was to create tools. But what if you can't code? Well, it's the same thing with automation, hire people who can. Here's one thing, simple tip. Go look at a story like this one by Cyrus Shepard, the 60 best free SEO tools and read through them. Find the ones that need site improvements or that could be made better in some way, shape, or form and then just go hire a contractor to build it. Yes, it's gonna cost some money, but when you host it on your site and give it away for free, you're gonna get publicity. You're gonna get links. You're gonna get traffic. You're gonna get a reputation for being the type of company that provides to the industry. And that's one of the easiest ways to start getting leads from other SEOs. Now, the fourth thing you have to do is publish because once you've actually created these tools, people have to learn about them. So write content regularly. Now, I know this is hard to constantly come up with ideas. So stop coming up with ideas. Instead, look at what other people have written and write your own commentary on them. This is a great opportunity to create conversations with leaders who are already writing innovative content and then letting them come to you in order to respond to your thoughts, your concerns, sometimes criticisms, and also the things that you found interesting and valuable about what they've written. Most people don't know this, but the way I got onto Rand Fishkin's radar first, many, many years ago, was in response to an article in which Rand wrote 10 things I still don't know about SEO. And I responded with an article, 10 things I know that Rand doesn't. Now, when I wrote that article, when I started, I didn't know the answers. So I went out and did research and did experimentation, but by responding, I developed a relationship with Moz. A decade later, I was working for Moz. I mean, this is exactly the way you build relationships. Now, you've got to acquire the company or at least the business once they reach out. So what's the hook? How do you convince somebody to actually sign up with you? Well, there are a couple of things that I found that really helpful. One, always know a complex problem about their site before you speak with them. We have a quick site audit inside of Moz. You just run it before you make a phone call and that way you're prepared to surprise the customer with something that you've already done your homework on. Second, you use that Turk I mentioned earlier, build trust by explaining that you don't offer certain services because you only work on the things that you specialize in. Third, avoid pricing games and say that. Say we don't do discounts, we just charge a fair price. And that's how we've always worked. Then I promise you'll, it'll save so much negotiation time and it'll make them trust you a lot more. And finally, be willing to walk away. You know, if the customer comes to you and says, look, I want a cheaper price than you're willing to offer, just say no. Say, look, we can't do the job you want at that price and we are not going to take that work and mess up your site. It's just not what we're willing to do. You'll earn respect for it. You might lose some business but in the long run it'll pay off. Now the last thing I want to talk about is autonomy. Autonomy is a lie. The number of consultancies that will produce a steady alternate income stream is practically zero. Build software, you got to compete. Launch sites, you got to compete. Lead gen, you got to compete. In all of these situations, you're competing with businesses that focus on just one of these while you're also running consultancy. Your goal should be a diverse set of payers, not a diverse set of industries or technologies or strategies. You wouldn't open up a fruit stand on the side. So why would you open up a software company on the side? Unless you can get some sort of external investment. Now here's the real trick. Here's the real reality and the last thing I want to talk about. Most companies never attempt to change. Of all the things that we've talked about that have been beneficial. Most of the time companies have never tried new tech, never tried remote, never added jobs, never cut jobs, never replaced leaders, never changed pricing, never specialized, never added new things, never cut old things and never automated. Most of the time people just keep doing the same thing. And if you experiment only when you have to, you're going to fail. But if you experiment now when you can and don't wait until you must, chances are you're going to grow and improve and succeed and beat out your competitors. And that's going to give you the type of healthy business that's going to help your customers and your families and employees for the long run. Thanks.